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Prize for Australian History

Immigration Nation is an ambitious and revealing three part series telling the secret history of how modern multicultural Australia was forged against the odds. The series uses interviews with eminent historians and eyewitnesses to these momentous events that built a nation, together with rarely seen archive footage and specially shot sequences in the actual places the events unfolded both here and overseas.
This is the story of who was allowed in and who was pushed out of a daring social experiment known as the White Australia Policy.

Across Australia, early Europeans commented again and again that the land looked like a park. With extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, it evoked a country estate in England. Bill Gammage has discovered this was because Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than we have ever realised....

McGregor offers a holistic interpretation of the complex relationship between Indigenous and settler Australians during the middle four decades of the twentieth century. Combining the perspectives of political, social and cultural history in a coherent narrative, he provides a cogent analysis of how the relationship changed, and the impediments to change....

With the founding of Melbourne in 1835, a flood of settlers began spreading out across the Australian continent. In three years more land – and more people – was conquered than in the preceding fifty....

Once a great nation-building icon, the wool business today is but a third of its size when Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’. The story is a tragedy that reaches into the offices of Prime Ministers and Cabinet members across seven federal governments and its agencies. Despite this politically sanctioned collapse, there has never been a royal commission. Until now, no one has investigated what precipitated the great crash of February 1991 or the industry’s ongoing decline....

For Australia, a new nation with a relatively small population, the death of 60,000 soldiers during World War I was catastrophic. It is hardly surprising, then, that Australians evaluating the consequences of the conflict have tended to focus primarily on the numbing number of losses — on the sheer quantity of all those countrymen who did not return....

The Censor’s Library, by Nicole Moore, is the first comprehensive examination of Australian book censorship, based around the author’s discovery of the secret ‘censor’s library’. Combining scholarship with the narrative tension of a thriller, Moore exposes the scandalous history of censorship in Australia.

The untold story of the Sandakan Death Marches of the Second World War.This is the story of the three-year ordeal of the Sandakan prisoners of war – a barely known episode of unimaginable horror. After the fall of Singapore in February 1942, the Japanese conquerors transferred 2500 British and Australian prisoners to a jungle camp some eight miles inland of Sandakan, on the east coast of North Borneo. For decades after the Second World War, the Australian and British governments would refuse to divulge the truth of what happened there, for fear of traumatising the families of the victims...